


Small Mercies

by Walutahanga



Series: After Hell [4]
Category: Angel: The Series (Comics), Angel: the Series
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 20:40:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Walutahanga/pseuds/Walutahanga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The aftermath of a character death in the comics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Mercies

Spike is the one to pick Dez up off the bathroom floor. His knuckles are still bruised and split from the warehouse fight. While Gunn is taping his ribs in the bathroom and Kate and Angel are still bickering over how to dispose of the body, Spike carries Dez to her room and lays her out on the bed. 

She’s cold now, muscles just beginning to stiffen. Her eyes are vacant, her face an oddly beautiful blend of human and animal. There’s blood in her hair where her scalp had split open on the side of the tub, but not too much. She’d already been dead when the soul-eater dropped her.

Illyria watches from the corner, eyes an eerie blue in the darkened room.

“Go on,” Spike says. “Ask.”

“You presume to know my thoughts?”

“You’re going to ask why respect the shell when the soul is gone.”

Except Dez’s soul hasn’t gone to the afterlife where all little souls are told they will go if they eat all their vegies and don’t commit any mass murders. Just gone. Sucked down, devoured, ripped apart.

Like Fred.

Spike’s fingers clench about the flannel, squeezing pink water into the basin. He’d never made any promises to Dez, but it still feels like he failed her somehow.

“It’s a shell,” Illyria says. “Why worship the shell when the essence is gone?”

“Don’t rightly know, love.” Spike folds Dez’s hands across her chest, ignoring where the fingernails had begun to darken into claws. “It’s a human thing, I suppose. And she was human, whatever she started off as.”

“You buried Jeremy,” Illyria persists. “It is important to you. You’re not human.”

“Used to be. Some things linger. You’d know all about that.”

Kate comes up a few minutes later, eyes red with grief, mouth tight with anger. She brings one of her black dresses, since Dez hadn’t been in the habit of collecting clothes. Spike thinks Dez would be better off in some type of armour, like the warriors of old sent off to the underworld in full regalia. But he doesn’t know what armour jaguar warriors wore, and it’s Kate’s way of giving her friend some of the humanity she’d struggled so hard for, so he lets it go. 

Perhaps there is a small mercy in all this. At least this way Dez will be spared the choice Spike and Angel were forced to make, between the human and the beast. She might even have been happy for it. (Spike is self aware enough to recognise this as a lie.) 

Laura brings up clean sheets to wrap the body in. She is as stiff and proper as always, but there’s a quiet dignity to her, a sort of gravity that makes everyone choke down their anger and confusion and lower their voices. Her hair, pinned precisely back, glows a dull ruddy red in the candle light and her slim fingers do not hesitate or deviate in the preparations. Spike might have tumbled her into bed once, but she’s still as much a mystery to him as the moment he jumped out of the van at Innovation Labs and saw her waiting behind Angel, outlined by fire.

Angel haunts the corridor but doesn’t enter the room.

“Another soldier down,” he says, when Spike joins him. He smells of old grief, but Spike knows it’s for other soldiers lost, not Dez. The guilt is fresh and sharp, and that will have to do.

Conner’s grief is raw and genuine. He asks for a few minutes alone in Dez’s room, and Spike knows later there will be a shirt in Conner’s closet, smelling faintly of cat and cloves and sword polish. He wishes for a way to make this easier, to soothe out the loss, even though intellectually he knows Conner has lost a great deal more in his short, turbulent life. Like another child halfway round the world, built out of blood and false memories, death is familiar to him.

Gunn brings the truck round front. He presses a kiss to Dez’s forehead, ignoring Conner’s glare, and whispers something into her hair that might have been an apology. Gunn looks like hell. He’s been through hell, having been hit over the head, tied to a chair, frozen, and fighting demonic warrior women after being discharged against medical advice. And there’s something else, something raw and broken in his eyes. Whatever barrier Conner’s antagonism and Spike’s soul-flu induced needling couldn’t penetrate, Eddie has ripped down and stomped all over. For that alone, Spike owes the ice-devil a beat-down next time he sees him.

“I’ll carry her,” Conner says, stepping forward. He lifts Dez’s body, firm and gentle, and Spike knows this is not the first time he’s done this for a loved one. Nor the last, if he continues on this path.

Dez is very small in the car, and they cover her with a tarp until they’re out of LA and deep enough in the forest. Angel has a place all picked out, so Spike knows he’s been expecting something like this for a long time, even if he hadn’t known who or when.

They all gather wood silently, like a ritual none of them have long enough memories to remember. They pile it high and lift Dez onto it.

“She didn’t find her sister,” Kate says suddenly, as they stand in a loose circle. “I just thought of that. She never found out what happened to her sister.”

No one says anything. Spike puts his arm around her.

Angel lights the pire. 


End file.
